The purpose of the ÆTHER project is to show that self-adaptive computing architectures can be a powerful approach to simultaneously addressing the major problems raised by pervasive computing. AETHER's main objectives are to study, evaluate and propose novel computing architectures responding to the most demanding embedded applications in the next 10+ years.

In particular, the AETHER project aims to tackle the issues related to the performance and technological scalability, increased complexity and programmability of future embedded computing architectures by introducing self-adaptive technologies in computing resources. The AETHER consortium will study and propose self-adaptive networked entities (SANE) based on reconfigurable computing architectures, and study their impact at various levels of the computing chain such as operating environments, programming methods and tools and application design. The potential benefits of the proposed approach will be assessed and validated with industrial partners on realistic application scenarios.